The importance of search engines

Search engines can make the difference between success and
failure for any website – personal or for profit. Visitors will be
unable to find you unless you’ve been able to advertise with great
success.

…do NOT use pop-up ads. People hate these! (Thus the
increased use of pop-up blockers). Try not to use a lot of extremely
bright flashing ads. The more professional the ad the more serious your
visitor will take the advertiser and the more likely they will be to
click.

Whether you are an old pro or newbie, to find success in these
competitive times you must follow the correct path. There are many
“tricks” which can be used for quick results but these will fade
quickly. When this happens, visitors will not return to your site
because they’re bored. Much the same can be said for the search engines
themselves.

Obviously the search engines cannot think for themselves, but the
companies that operate them are facing the same highly competitive
circumstances as you. If the searches returned are junk, surfers will
switch to another engine and those companies lose money. Think about
the bing commercial which is running on television. The teen asks her father is he has purchased a cell phone and both parents start spewing all sorts of “related” nonsense.

Your site MUST have a strong foundation with plenty of actual
content. People are busy and not interested in pages of nothing but ads
and links. If you are able to get and keep a visitor’s interest, you
are on the way to success. Most visitors tell their friends when they
come across a good site.

New content will also keep the search engines busy at your site
which will mean higher rankings and – you guessed it – more visitors.
Search engines constantly improve their algorithms to find websites
which actually have content and not massive pages of links and ads.
With these changes, content sites grow more and more profitable.
Relevant and/or entertaining content = SUCCESS!

Not a writer? No worries. There are sites which are repositories
for free articles written by freelancers. If you want more unique
articles, you’ll find you can hire freelance writers. This will
obviously cost you some money but with some work it should pay off with
hits.

Make sure that you don’t overload each page with advertisements
and do NOT use pop-up ads. People hate these! (Thus the increased use
of pop-up blockers). Try not to use a lot of extremely bright flashing
ads. The more professional the ad the more serious your visitor will
take the advertiser and the more likely they will be to click. Using
the content on your site to attract visitors and keep them on your site
will also increase the chances of having them buying a product or at
least checking it out. They must be interested in your site and trust
you or they will never pay attention to the ads. They are probably not
coming back either. So, to pound the idea home – fill your site with
relevant content.

Many people seeking to get rich quick think the more sites they
build the better they will do. They have read the making money on the
Internet articles, gleaned some information and ran with it. It seems
they only noticed monetizing websites and search engine optimization.
You see a lot of computer generated sites or carbon-copy sites with
tons of ads and no substance. According to some sources, these same get
richer quick webmasters will produce hundreds of sites each containing
1,000s of pages. In the “old days” this could work and bring these
individuals tons of cash. Technology has not stood still but these
schemers have.

There are now algorithms weeding out many of the
computer-generated sites and those with no or poor content. In order to
stand apart, you must be able to adapt. Change your direction and
actually WORK to create individual, content-driven websites. It will
take a lot of time, effort and energy as well as studying to see what
you must do to achieve results. Small sites with very relevant content
will do better than those with 1,000s of useless pages.

Organization on your site is also extremely important. Even if
you have the best site on the Internet, if your visitor can’t find what
brought them to you, the site is worthless. People today are busy and
have short attention spans. They will not set off hunting the
information on your site. Lay out your individual pages well and make
sure you know what will be on each page. Use different, related,
keywords for each page and make certain the stories and ads on the page
are related. This will also help your search engine optimization. Each
page needs to be organized, clear and easy to follow. Pages with large
breaks can mislead your reader into thinking the article has ended.
They stop reading and ads further down the page are worthless. The
reader may also lose interest in your site after reading an incomplete
article.

It’s important to run spell check on your pages before you upload
them. If you find a mistake later, you have to reload it and waste
important time. Also, would you trust someone who has a ton of
misspellings and/or grammatical errors? No one is perfect, mistakes
will get by you. Just make sure the article is not full of them.

Check each page thoroughly once you’ve posted them online. Make
sure you don’t have missing graphics, lost pages, links to other sites
which no long work, or any other type of error. A site with numerous
errors can affect your page rank and, by association, your bottom line.

You may not get rich working online and you certainly will not do
it overnight (unless you hit the lottery). With a lot of work, effort
and studying, you should be able to make a comfortable living at home.
Stay current and say goodbye to the boss!

About the author:

Shades is
a former award-winning photographer and newspaper journalist. Due to an
automobile accident, Shades had to switch to designing and maintaining
websites. The most prominent was the popular fan site Planet Jendell.
After a break of a few years, Shades now writes for Read It Here!. The author invites you to visit The Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy Syndrome Association.